Hard Drives
Information about Hard Drives
What is a Hard Drive?
How do Hard Drives work?
When you save a document, it gets written somewhere "non-volatile" that keeps its state even when the power is off. ...The hard drive contains a spinning platter with a thin magnetic coating.A "head" moves over the platter, writing 0's and 1's as tiny areas of magnetic North or South on the platter.
Fun facts about Hard Drives
1.IBM Model 350 Disk File, the first hard drive, was created by IBM in 1956. The hard drive was made from 50 discs. The whole thing was as big as a regular table. The capacity of the hard drive was 5 MB. The price was USD 3200.
2.The hard drives reached 1 TB (1000GB) storage capacity in 2007. Two years later the maximal capacity was doubled.
3.The first hard drive over 1GB was made by IBM in 1980. The model was IBM 3380 and had 2.52 GB storage surface. The hard drive was pretty damn big. The device loked like a refrigerator and weighted 250kg.
4. The first commercial hard drive (5MB) was made by Apple in 1981 and was available for USD 3200.
Who invented Hard Drives?
In 1953, IBM recognized the immediate application for what it termed a "Random Access File" having high capacity and rapid random access at a relatively low cost.After considering technologies such as wire matrices, rod arrays, drums, drum arrays, etc.the engineers at IBM's San Jose California laboratory invented the hard disk drive. The disk drive created a new level in the computer data hierarchy, then termed Random Access Storage but today known as secondary storage, less expensive and slower than main memory (then typically drums) but faster and more expensive than tape drives.
The commercial usage of hard disk drives began in 1956, with the shipment of an IBM 305 RAMAC system including IBM Model 350 disk storage. US Patent 3,503,060 issued March 24, 1970, and arising from the IBM RAMAC program is generally considered to be the fundamental patent for disk drives.